Local Juju

I have a bit of a fetish for being able to hack offline. It’s becoming increasingly old-fashioned, I know, but I’d like to think that eventually it will become a quirky and charming eccentricity, such as one might find in a British amateur sleuth.

I wanted to get up and running with Juju, Canonical’s funky cloud orchestration thingy. We’re doing a lot more service-oriented stuff in recent months, and it’s very handy to be to just deploy something without having to faff about for a couple of hours. Since I’d like to stand a chance of doing this without a net connection, I set it up locally.

With the help of the Charm School page, the local provider docs and the kind folk at #juju on Freenode, I got something up and running. Some notes about the experience:

• I did all of this in precise, and it seemed to work just fine. I substituted ‘precise’ for ‘oneiric’ wherever I saw it.
• I had to manually add my user to the libvirtd group. The instructions implied that this was not necessary.
• juju bootstrap finished very quickly for me and without any actual evidence that it had debootstrapped the whole OS.
• When I deployed services, I didn’t get any feedback that anything was going on. The recommended debug-log command showed very little output for a while. My guess is that this was while packages were downloading.